(Rachel) Rose Schneiderman

Labour leader and social reformer, born in Savin, Poland. Emigrating to the USA in 1892, she went to work in her early teens sewing caps. In 1903 she helped organize a New York City local of the United Cloth and Cap Makers and took the lead in getting women elected to the union, and in 1904 she was elected to the union's executive board, the highest position yet held by a woman in any American labour organization. In 1905 she joined the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), the national organization that led the fight to improve conditions of working women, and remained among the WTUL's most active leaders for 45 years, serving as president in 1926–50. She took a major role in several of the landmark events of the American labour struggle. In 1909 she called for the strike of women waistmakers, and that same year she took a role in organizing the garment workers, and denounced all those who had contributed to the disastrous Triangle Waist Co fire in 1911. In addition to these and many other actions with the WTUL, she worked for women's right to vote and helped organize the International Congress of Labor. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed her (the only woman) to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Act (1933–5). She was also secretary of the New York State Department of Labor (1937–43). she lectured widely before diverse audiences and served on various boards, ending her long life as one of the most respected spokespersons and activists for improving the conditions of labouring people.

Rose Schneiderman (April 6, 1882– August 11, 1972) was a prominent United States labor union leader and socialist of the first part of the twentieth century.

Schneiderman went to work in 1895, first as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a lining stitcher in a cap factory in New York City's Lower East Side.

She returned to New York in 1903 and, with a fellow worker, started organizing the women in her factory. When they applied for a charter to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, the union told them to come back after they had succeeded in organizing twenty five women. They did that within days and the union then chartered its first women's local.

Schneiderman obtained wider recognition during a citywide capmakers' strike in 1905. Elected secretary of her local and a delegate to the New York City Central Labor Union, she came into contact with the New York Women's Trade Union League, an organization that lent moral and financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers. She was an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1909.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which more than 100 garment workers were burned alive or died jumping from the ninth floor of a factory building, dramatized the conditions that Schneiderman, the WTUL and the union movement were fighting. The WTUL had documented similar unsafe conditions — factories without fire escapes or that had locked the exit doors to keep workers from stealing materials — at dozens of sweatshops in New York City and surrounding communities; twenty-five workers had died in a similar sweatshop fire in Newark, New Jersey shortly before the Triangle disaster. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Despite her harsh words, Schneiderman continued working in the WTUL as an organizer, returning to it after a frustrating year on the staff of the male-dominated ILGWU.

She also served on the National Recovery Administration’s Labor Advisory Board in the 1930s, was a member of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "brain trust" during that decade, and worked as secretary of the New York State Department of Labor from 1937 to 1944.

Schneiderman was an active feminist, campaigning for women's suffrage as a member of the National American Women Suffrage Association and running for the United States Senate as the candidate of the Farmer Labor Party in 1920, receiving just 15,086 votes and finishing behind Prohibitionist Ella A.

Schneiderman saw suffrage as part and parcel of her fight for economic rights. When a state legislator warned in 1912 that "Get women into the arena of politics with its alliances and distressing contests--the delicacy is gone, the charm is gone, and you emasculize women", Schneiderman replied:

We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat. Yet the Senator says nothing about these women losing their charm. Women in the laundries, for instance, stand for 13 or 14 hours in the terrible steam and heat with their hands in hot starch. Surely these women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round.

She helped pass the New York state referendum in 1917 that gave women the right to vote. On the other hand, Schneiderman opposed passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution proposed by the National Woman's Party on the ground that it would deprive working women of the special statutory protections for which the WTUL had fought so hard.

Schneiderman is also credited with coining one of the most memorable phrases of the women's movement and the labor movement of her era:

What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.

Her phrase "bread and roses", recast as "We want bread and roses too", became the slogan of the largely immigrant, largely women workers of the woolen industry of Lawrence, Massachusetts on strike in 1912.

Schneiderman was a close personal and working associate of Maud O'Farrell Swartz, another working class woman active in the WTUL, until Swartz' death in 1937. Progress is slow, especially where women are concerned.

Schneiderman published her memoirs, All for One, in 1967. the Women's Trade Union League,Beaufort Books 1981 Orleck, Annalise Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1995 Schneiderman, Rose, All for one, New York, P.